Nightmares
by Jo-Anne Storm
Summary: My take on Pregnant!Cameron. House POV.


It's all about the details. Details House can't help but notice and catalogue.

With Cuddy its cancer kids and sprinkles. With Stacey it was a hand cradled low on her stomach and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Cameron is a sudden increase in caffeine intake and a tightening around the eyes.

When neither of those things happened on schedule, he didn't think much of it. There were a lot of different things that could cause her schedule to be off. They worked in a stressful job, after all.

A week later the nightmares started.

He held off until the day the smell of coffee sent her running to the sink. She wasn't dating anyone; there'd been no hearts or flowers sent to the office and she didn't walk around with a love-sick air. Cameron, with the one unfortunate exception, wasn't the kind to have a one night stand and nothing indicated that she had made another stupid mistake like that. He seriously doubted she went the way Cuddy did. IVF wasn't romantic enough for her.

He tossed a script for prenatal vitamins on her desk and told her that she was confined to the lab and the office. She tried to argue, of course. He told her if she really wanted to see patients she could help Wilson.

That night he dreamed of her in the containment room, screaming in pain as he could do nothing but watch.

Two months in and House had forbidden coffee in the office, something that put the three men in a bad mood, but kept her from throwing up what little breakfast she managed to keep down that morning. A couch was stolen from one of the nicer staff lounges and the fridge was stocked with Sprite and OJ.

Cuddy hadn't noticed the sudden lack of immunologist in the clinic or the patient rooms, too caught up in her own advanced pregnancy to catch every detail. And it was possible that he has purposely been distracting her from figuring it out. Wilson knew, and had just looked at House with worry in his eyes.

Foreman, always one to enjoy an argument, went to bat for her during one case, telling all the reasons that Cameron herself had to examine that particular patient. He calmly listened to the rant and then told the neurologist that he could be the one to explain to her that her child was brain dead because she had stupidly exposed herself to meningitis. Foreman didn't argue his ruling after that.

He dreamed of autopsying a baby with Cameron's dark hair. He woke up screaming.

He snarked on the inconvenience, of course, and stole her file once he was sure she'd had her first OB appointment. Clarkson was an idiot so he bribed Emeret to have her moved to his patient list. Emeret was an idiot, too, but the best OB in the hospital.

The file said nothing about the father. He doesn't know if that's a good or a bad thing.

The months pass and coffee was once again allowed in her presence. She doesn't glow, not at first. As her belly rounded so did her face and before he knew it both Foreman and Chase have hands on her, feeling the baby kick. She doesn't offer the let him feel, and he doesn't request. But different flavors of ice cream appear in the freezer and he smacked Chase's hand away the one time the man reached for one.

Cuddy had come down hard on the baby ward both after the epidemic and before the birth of her son. He knew that it was unlikely that anything could go wrong, but nevertheless he found himself making weekly trips to the ward to observe and critique. He caught Wilson once and Foreman twice, doing the same thing.

He tried not to think about his own OB rotation: of the one epidural that went terribly wrong and paralyzed the mother or the one baby that was strangled by the umbilical cord. The nightmares continued.

By the ninth month there was still no sign of the father. He had heard both Chase and Foreman ask enough, both threatened to beat the absent man up. Cameron remained close-mouthed.

A week before her due date, he found himself standing at the window, staring down at Baby Girl Cameron, and wondered how such a tiny thing had crawled into his heart when she couldn't even lift her head yet.

He told Cameron not to expect any special privileges just because she had a vagina and could give birth. He bribed the hospital daycare to put her at the top of the waiting list to insure that his immunologist could come back to work the second her maternity leave was up and installed a privacy screen and comfortable chair in the corner of the office so that she could nurse Sarah in peace.

That night, he dreamed of a brave little girl with Cameron's eyes fighting cancer.


End file.
